The world looks back

Online, NCPR's main aim is to inform the region about itself and about the world. A secondary aim is to inform the world about the North Country. In crunching the numbers, I am amazed at the way the second task works. One third of our traffic arrives via search engines such as Google. Most comes from North America, but in the last month we have had visitors from more than 100 countries, including 310 visits from the United Kingdom, 99 from Japan, 68 from Brazil, 107 from Austalia, 12 from South Africa, 20 from Jordan, and two from Fiji.

One of the slightly creepy wonders of a good stats package is that I can tell where visitors from a given country or city landed in our site. One of our Fijian visitors viewed an audio slideshow about an Ontario beekeeper. A visitor from Myanmar looked at our series on biofuels. One visitor from Sarajevo went to The Folk Show page; another went to the Community Calendar. Three visitors from China apparently wanted to know about finding nude models in Chestertown. Visitors from Iran wanted to know about trash burning and to hear a review of "My Fair Lady." One Ukrainian likes Celtic harp and flamenco guitar, while our single Paraguayan visitor favors String Fever. UpNorth Music performer Kevin Irwin has at least one fan in Poland. Next door in Germany they are listening to Celia Evans and Scott Shipley.

All told, the world appears to be getting a somewhat quirky and spotty view of the North Country. But then consider what I know about Fiji--nice beaches, or Paraguay--it's in South America. I have to wonder though, just what do they make of 'enry and Eliza in Tehran.

Lurch engine

I've been spending a lot of time the last few months observing your habits. No--that wasn't me following you home in the beige Corolla--but observing your habits as a web visitor to NCPR, as tweaked out by the subtle algorithms of stats analysis. One number that jumped out at me was that 30+% of you come to our pages via an outside search engine. That tells me a couple of things-first, that many people come to NCPR from all over the world, looking for one thing that matched their interest, not to visit a local public radio website per se. This is a good thing; part of our work is to provide a window into the North Country for the world. But it also tells me that large numbers of our local audience are resorting to Google because they can't locate what they are looking for either through our site navigation, or through the poor literal-minded, three-legged site search tool that is built into ncpr.org. And that is, how you say, suboptimal.

After years of looking for a better internal search feature--something cheap, feature-rich and open-source, by preference--after trying to write search tips that are rarely read and only occasionally helpful, after trying to add extra search tools that give the visitor different options, we have decided to break free from our instinctive public radio penny-pinching and solve the problem the old-fashioned way--throw some money at it. In these days, a search engine that doesn't function in the same way that Google or Yahoo or any other big player does is not a search engine, it's a hide engine. So on our immediate shopping list is the Google Mini Search Appliance, one more heat-producing device to compete with the air-conditioner in the web office, but one that will allow visitors to search (and to actually find) whatever they are looking for at NCPR. Also in the works is a retooled site design that will navigate in a more logical and consistent way from page to page. If you have any horror stories about getting lost at NCPR, and any suggestions on smoothing the way, please drop me a line at radio@ncpr.org.